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biological basis for his response to anxiety helped to calm the nervousness he often felt under pressure.
    “We got it!” boomed a Brooklyn accent from the lab’s open doorway.
    Startled for the second time that night, Ethan turned to see his mentor, Elijah Schiff, bound into the room. His eyes sparked with excitement below his thick, white, unkempt hair. His khaki pants sported a coffee stain on one knee, while a striped tie whose advanced age was betrayed by the frayed strings of silk around its edges hung around the open collar of his blue oxford shirt. He held up several sheets of paper crumpled in his hands.
    Ethan wondered what had brought Elijah back to the office at this hour, and he figured he’d be none too pleased to see Houston here. But when Elijah met Houston’s glare, he seemed unfazed, as if he’d expected him to be there.
    “What is it you got ?” Houston asked.
    “Funding.” The elder professor’s smile revealed crooked teeth that his working-class family had never had the money to fix.
    “You’re serious?” Ethan asked.
    When their first grant started to run low, Elijah had tried to get re-funded by the original foundation but had been told that the foundation’s priorities had changed toward projects “with more concrete medical benefits.” Elijah had suspected that the continued failure of the Logos to produce any results in their test subjects had more to do with the rejection than did any changing priorities. The other foundations the senior professor approached had dismissed them out of hand, questioning whether the topic of their study was an appropriate one for psychiatry or, as one foundation director put it, “better off left to the Theology Department.”
    “And where did this last-minute funding come from?” Houston stuffed his hands in his pockets.
    Although Elijah was close to retirement age, Ethan had noticed how his mentor made Houston uncomfortable. Maybe it was because Elijah refused to participate in the game that was university politics, or maybe it was just because the professor was so much smarter.
    Elijah waved a hand. “A new foundation based in Dallas—last-ditch try, really. I met today with an old classmate of mine from Harvard who’s the Executive Director.”
    Ethan didn’t remember Elijah mentioning a classmate.
    “Which foundation?” Houston asked.
    “The NAF: Neurological Advancement Foundation.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    Elijah shrugged. “Until recently, me neither.”
    “How much are we talking about?”
    Elijah’s smile widened. “Two hundred fifty thousand for the next eighteen months.”
    Houston’s eyebrows shot upward, while Ethan’s jaw dropped. Such an amount was huge for a psychology study. How does he do it? Ethan wondered.
    “The foundation was set up by a Texas software tycoon whose teenage son committed suicide.” He paced over to his desk and dropped the papers in the midst of his journals. “Schizophrenia. He claimed he heard the voices of saints—they were a strong Catholic family, you see.”
    The perfect funding source , Ethan thought. “So this tycoon is interested in the psychological basis of religious experiences?”
    “How convenient,” Houston said.
    “Imagine for a moment”—Elijah pulled out his desk chair and sat, reclining so far back that Ethan worried he might tip over—“that certain individuals have the ability to sense that which most of us cannot see.” He picked up a ballpoint pen from his desk and began to twirl it between his fingers. “Life is something more than mere matter made of molecules. What is it that animates life itself? I’m not talking about a God who molds us like a sculptor making figurines from clay or a God who acts on the world like a puppeteer manipulating the strings of a marionette. What if God is more intimate to life itself? If physicists can study the Big Bang by examining the background microwave radiation left in the universe from that event, maybe we can hear the